Bernie Madoff's Victims: The List

UPDATE: On Feb 4,
2009, the bankruptcy court published an official list of Madoff
"customers." You can
read it here >

EARLIER: Word on the identities of Bernie
Madoff's clients / victimes continues to emerge. The total losses
reported so far
add up to about $30 billion. Please add new names to
comments (or via email to hblodget@alleyinsider.com).

HSBC "has emerged as one the largest victims of
Bernard Madoff’s alleged fraud with potential exposure of about
$1bn...HSBC’s exposure
stemmed from loans it provided to institutional clients, mainly
hedge funds of funds, that wanted to invest with Mr Madoff.
HSBC’s direct exposure is believed to be about $1bn in loans
provided to clients who invested some $500m of their own funds in
Mr Madoff’s venture. Under the typical terms of these deals, if
the US authorities recover any funds from Mr Madoff, HSBC
will be paid first, with its clients suffering the first tranche
of losses." (FT:)

Access International. $1.4 billion

Fortis Bank. $1.4 billion

Man Group’s RMF division has about
$350m
invested in funds which outsourced their management to Madoff
securities, although this is a tiny fraction of the division’s
$25bn of assets. (FT)

Pioneer Investments, an arm of Italy’s
UniCredit, had “substantially all” of $835minvested with Madoff. (FT)

Union Bancaire Privet: $1.1
billion

Benbasset & Cie:$935 million

BBVA: $404
million

Maxam Capital Management LLC. Combined
loss of $280
million. "I'm wiped out," said Sandra Manzke,
Maxam's founder and chairman. The Darien, Conn., fund of hedge
funds will have to close as a result of the losses, she said.
(WSJ)

Fairfield Greenwich Group.
Bloomberg: The biggest loser may be
Walter Noel’s Fairfield Greenwich Group, whose $7.3 billion Fairfield
Sentry Ltd. invested with Madoff’s eponymous firm,
three people familiar with the matter said... Fairfield Sentry
has a record of more than 15 years with an annual return of 4 to
6 percentage points above benchmark interest rates, according to
a marketing document dated this month that was prepared by
Zurich-based NPB New Private Bank Ltd. On an absolute basis,
returns exceeded 10 percent every year from 1991 through 2000.
Since then, they ranged from 6.4 percent to 9.8 percent...The
strategy is a “split-strike conversion,” where the investment
manager buys shares of large U.S. companies and enters into
options contracts to limit the risk, the document says.

Fix Asset Management.
Bloomberg: Fix Asset Management, which had an account worth
at least $400
million with Madoff Investments. The firm said
it’s checking with lawyers about the holdings. “We are very
shocked,” John Fix, the son of founder Charles Fix, said by phone
from Greece. “We put in redemptions in the past few months and
got our money back no problem. We are just so surprised about all
this.”

Santander.
WSJ: The eurozone's largest bank by market value, said its
clients had an exposure of €2.33 billion ($3.1 billion) to Madoff's
investment funds, mainly through its Optimal Strategic US Equity
fund. More than €2 billion belongs to institutional investors and
international clients of its private-banking business, which
provides services to wealthy individuals, it said. The remaining
€320 million belongs to private-banking customers in Spain, where
Santander is based.

Thyssen Family. Source sends the
following: Thybo Investments grew out
of a family office for Thyssen. They have been in fund of funds
it seems since 1989.Thybo International is a
"proper" fund of fund but it's newer share class G invests only
in one manager - and i'm 99% sure it's Madoff as the returns are
almost the same. Some more info.The fund started in Jan
2007.Ernst & Young.
Luxembourg are the auditors.UBS Luxembourg is the
administrator.Thybo states on their
webpage: "Our track record incorporates audited financial
statements at both a composite firm-wide and individual
portfolios level."

Ira Roth's family.
WSJ: Ira Roth, a New Jersey resident, who says his family has
about $1 million invested through Mr. Madoff's firm, is "in a
state of panic." He said his 86-year-old mother-in-law has been
living on the investments' returns, and he has been using the
funds to pay college tuition.

Sterling Equities. Fund controlled by Fred
Wilpon, co-owner of the NY Mets, confirms it had money with
Madoff.

Stephen Abbott, a San Francisco lawyer.
WSJ: [Abbott] and two siblings had several hundred thousand
dollars invested with Mr. Madoff. They inherited the trust from
their father, who had befriended Mr. Madoff years ago.
Performance remained steady through the current bear market, he
said. "People were floored," he says. "We were making money in
this lousy market." He says he is concerned about recovering the
money but "you have to get philosophical about this stuff. It
could be worse; we still have our health."

Palm Beach Country Club. Source: CNBC's
David Faber

Lawrence Velvel, "69, dean of the Massachusetts
School of Law, said he and a friend may have lost millions of
dollars between them (AP).
"This is a major disaster for a lot of people," Velvel said in a
telephone interview from his Andover, Mass., office. "You work
all your life, you finally manage to save up something, and
somebody who's entrusted with it, it turns out suddenly he's a
crook. Lots of people are getting fully or partially wiped out."
Velvel said he wants to know where government regulators, as well
as accountants and others at Madoff's company, were when the
money was being lost." (AP)

Loeb Family. Source: CNBC's David Faber

J. Ezra
Merkin. GMAC LLC Chairman.
WSJ: Mr. Merkin, the chairman of former General Motors Corp.
financing arm GMAC, is also a money manager at Ascot Partners LLC
in New York. Ascot, which had $1.8 billion under management
as of Sept. 30, had substantially all of its assets invested with
Mr. Madoff, according to a letter to Mr. Merkin sent to clients
Thursday night. Mr. Merkin said as one of the largest investors
in Ascot, he believed he had personally "suffered major losses
from this catastrophe."

Mort Zuckerman. Mr. Zuckerman, the chairman of
real-estate firm Boston Properties and owner of the New York
Daily News and U.S. News & World Report, had significant
exposure through a fund that invested substantially all of its
assets with Mr. Madoff (WSJ)

Richard Spring.
WSJ: A Boca Raton resident and former securities analyst,
says he had about $11
million -- or 95% of his net worth -- invested
with Mr. Madoff. "That's how much I believed in him," Mr. Spring
said.

Elie Wiesel's Foundation For Humanity. Lost
$37 million.

Members of half-a-dozen country clubs:
WSJ: "Mr. Madoff tapped social networks in Dallas, Chicago,
Boston and Minneapolis. In Minnesota, he attracted investors from
Hillcrest Golf Club of St. Paul and Oak Ridge Country Club in
Hopkins, investors say. One of them estimated that investors from
the two clubs may have invested more than $100 million combined.
One of the largest clusters of Madoff investors was in Florida,
where losses could be substantial. Mr. Madoff relied on a network
of friends, family and business colleagues to attract investors.
According to investors and agents, some of these agents were paid
commissions for harvesting investors. Others had separate,
lucrative business relationships with Mr. Madoff. "If you were
eating lunch at the club or golfing, everyone was always talking
about how Madoff was making them all this money," one investor
says. "Everyone wanted to sign up." Jeff Fischer, a top divorce
attorney in Palm Beach, says many of his clients were also Mr.
Madoff's clients. "Every big divorce that came through my office
had portfolio positions with Madoff," he says. Two of his
investors said that among his clients, Mr. Madoff was considered
a money-management legend; they would joke that if Mr. Madoff was
a fraud, he'd take down half the world with him."

Bramdean Alternatives in the U.K. 9% of
portfolio.

Banque Benedict Hentsch, Geneva-based private
bank, $47.5
million.

Nomura and Neue Privat Bank. "Marketed access to
Fairfield Sentry Ltd., a fund overseen by Mr. Madoff and sold
through Fairfield Greenwich. The shares offered by Neue Privat
and Nomura were leveraged three times -- meaning $3 of borrowed
money was added to every $1 of capital invested in order to
magnify returns, greatly increasing the potential losses for
those investors." (WSJ)

Wunderkinder Foundation, a Steven Spielberg
charity. In the past the foundation "appears to have invested a
significant portion of its assets with Mr. Madoff, based on
regulatory filings. In 2006, the Madoff firm accounted for
roughly 70% of the foundation's interest and dividend income,
according to regulatory filings. A representative of Mr.
Spielberg confirmed that the foundation has suffered losses on
its investments with the Madoff firm. He said he didn't know the
size of the losses and couldn't comment further, including on
whether Mr. Spielberg had any of his own money invested with the
Madoff firm."
WSJ

BNP Paribas. "BNP Paribas's exposure, the extent
of which is not clear, may stem from BNP's lending relationship
with a fund of funds that was a big Madoff client, said people
familiar with the matter. A BNP spokeswoman declined to comment."
WSJ: BNP, France's largest bank by market value, said it
could lose as much as 350 million euros as a result of the
alleged fraud. The bank said it has no investment of its own in
the hedge funds managed by Bernard Madoff Investment Services.
BNP Paribas, however, said it is exposed to these funds through
its trading business and lending to hedge funds that had invested
in Madoff's funds.

Swiss private bank Reichmuth & Co. "said its
clients had an exposure of some 385 million Swiss francs to
Madoff funds. The bank said Reichmuth
Matterhorn, a fund that invests in other hedge funds,
faced a potential loss of about 8.6% on its exposure to Madoff.
That amount represented about 3.5% of the 11 billion Swiss Francs
Reichmuth & Co. has under management, the bank said."
(WSJ)

Union Bancaire Privee. UBP spokesman said the
bank's clients have "limited" losses related to Madoff, but
wouldn't be more specific or comment further. (WSJ)

EIM Group, the European investment manager with
about $11 billion in assets, had a number of non-U.S. investors
into funds overseen by Mr. Madoff, according to people familiar
with the matter. Overall, EIM assets at risk are less than 2% of
what it manages, which means losses could top $200 million.
(WSJ).

UBS: ""Very limited" direct exposure to the
Madoff funds...But the Zurich-based bank's wealth-management arm
helped clients in Europe and possibly elsewhere invest with Mr.
Madoff, according to investment professionals in Europe who spoke
with some of these clients. UBS is currently reviewing its
clients' exposure to Mr. Madoff's funds, according to the person
familiar with the matter. The person said the funds weren't on
UBS's list of "recommended" investments for its U.S. clients, but
that they may have been among the firm's suggested investments
for overseas clients." (WSJ)

Carl and Ruth Shapiro, donors to Brandeis
University, and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.The Boston Globe reported on Saturday that
the Shapiro family foundation lost
almost half its money, or about $145 million.

Fairfield County, Connecticut.
Bloomberg: First Selectman Ken Flatto and other elected
officials in Fairfield, Connecticut, thought the 58,000- person
town’s pension fund was holding up well amid the worst financial
crisis since the Great Depression. The 18 percent decline
in total assets since the end of June looked smart compared with
the 31 percent plunge in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index, and
total assets of $286 million left a cushion over the $270 million
of estimated liabilities. Flatto’s mood darkened yesterday when
he heard Bernard Madoff, a Wall Street executive who oversaw $42
million of the assets, had been arrested and charged with
fraud. “We classified this on our portfolio as one of the
more conservative investments,” Flatto said in an interview. “You
rely on your experts and your managers to be honest.”

Gerald Breslauer. Jeff Katzenberg and
Steven Spielberg's financial advisor.
WSJ: According to people familiar with the matter, Mr.
Breslauer himself has likely sustained heavy losses in the Madoff
affair. He customarily invests alongside his clients, say these
people, and has sometimes been a larger investor than the people
he represented. People familiar with the matter said Mr.
Breslauer was known to be a Madoff investor.

Jewish Federation of Greater Washington said it
had $10 million invested with Mr. Madoff, about 8 percent of its
endowment as of Nov. 30. The organization said it would work to
recover the money. (NYT)

North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System:
$5.7 million exposure to Madoff Securities in the form of a gift
from a donor who insisted that it be invested that way. “The
donor who contributed the funds has graciously agreed to
reimburse the health system for any financial loss,” the
organization said in a statement. (NYT)

Ramaz School lost some $6 million invested with
Mr. Madoff, according to a letter sent to board members and two
parents whose children attend the school. (NYT)

SAR Academy, a Jewish school in the Bronx, had
roughly a third of its $3.7 million in assets invested with Mr.
Madoff, according to an e-mail message it sent to donors and
parents. (NYT)

Chais Family Foundation in Encino, Calif.,
announced over the weekend that its losses had forced it to stop
operating, according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. The
foundation had $178 million in assets in May 2007, according to
its tax form. (NYT)

JEHT Foundation. May have lost hundreds of
millions. Will cease operations. (NYT)

Arpad Busson. Uma Thurman's billionaire fiance
runs hedge fund, EIM, which was reportedly exposed to roughly
$270 million of products sold by Madoff (Mail
on Sunday)

Accountants Scott Sosnik & Larry Bell.
Accountants who worked for many of Madoff victims
claim that they too lost money.

Get THE DRONES REPORT now! Commercial drones are already a reality. BI Intelligence takes an in-depth look at the most important aspects, including market forecasts for commercial applications, regulatory process, and the leading players. Get the Report Here &raquo